Thank you for becoming a new member of the Open Networking Foundation. Your participation is critical for achieving our shared goal of transforming the networking industry.

To help you be as effective as possible, we've created this handbook to give you all of the tools and information you need to get started. If you have any questions, suggestions or feedback about this, please let us know.

Benefits

Each membership level comes with a number of specific benefits. A good place to start with getting involved in the community is to get a good understanding of what benefits you have access to and how to make use of those benefits. This chart provides a high-level overview of membership benefits and more details are provided below.

Developer Assist Benefits

ONF members are eligible to receive these Developer Assist benefits. This is a community-based team that provides a specialized form of assistance for developers who are using and customizing ONF platforms and solutions.

Marketing Benefits

If you are eligible to use the ONF logo, you may access the the logos here available in multiple formats.

Plugging In To the Community

This section provides guidance on where to go to start getting involved in community discussions and activities.

Announcing You To The Community

We're excited that you've joined the community and we want to share that news with existing community members. For partners, we'll work with you to do a dedicated post about your organization and what you're doing. For other organizations, we tend to announce new members in small groups. Soon after you join, our PR team will be in touch to work with you on an announcement. For organizations actively involved in either the ONOS or CORD projects, we'll also be adding your logo to the members page on the project site.

There's no need to wait for a formal announcement before you show up and talk to other community members though. Please feel free to join the discussion on any of the community channels (more details on those below). Share information about who you are and what you're interested in, offer thoughts and ideas on existing conversations, and take part in the activities taking place in the community.

Community Channels

Community discussions happen in a number of places and it can feel overwhelming at first to figure out where to go and how to keep track of it all. You don't need to subscribe to or monitor every one of these channels – important information will often be shared across most or all of these.

Newsletter:We offer an email newsletter that provides a nice digest of recent community news. This is the best place to start and is a good option if you don't want the level of detail provided by other community channels. This Newsletter is for ONF Members only, so please use your member company email address when subscribing

Mailing lists: We use Google Groups for mailing list discussions. Lists don't provide you the same real-time conversations as Slack, although in a global community be aware that lists give you access to talk with everyone around the world and on Slack you can only talk to people who are online when you are. Here are links to the different mailing lists:

Note: We invite you to join the discussion on the ONF Community Discuss list. As someone who is starting to get involved in the community, we value the perspective you bring and are very interested in hearing ideas about ways that your experience with getting started could have been made better or hearing about things that have been particularly useful to you so far.

Chat:We use Slack for real-time chat communications. There are different instances for Slack for the different projects. An invitation is required to join a Slack instance, but you can easily get an invitation yourself. Here are the different Slack instances and links to request invitations:

Social media: We mainly use Twitter for social media. Feel free to follow us and help us amplify the message about the work you and the rest of the community are doing. Here are links to our Twitter accounts:

Meetings: We use a variety of video and audio conferencing systems for meetings (GoToMeeting, UberConference, Google Hangouts, etc). Many important discussions and decisions get made in meetings so you are encouraged to attend meetings that are relevant for your interests. Please check the ONOS community calendar and CORD community calendar for a full list of meetings – details about how to dial-in will be available on the calendar entries. Here are some of the major meetings you should consider attending:

Technical Steering Team meetings: The TST meetings are a good place to go for technical discussions about CORD and ONOS (note that there are other meetings that focus on technical topics but the TST meetings provide a good overview of the projects). Find out more on the

Community Steering Team meetings: The CST meetings are a good place to go for discussions about how we're growing and strengthening the ONF, CORD and ONOS communities. If you'd like to learn more or if you'd like to get involved and help us build the community, feel free to join the call. Find out more on the Community Steering Team wiki.

Events: There are multiple opportunities throughout the year when community members meet in person at events – some of these are events the ONF organizes (such as ONOS Build and CORD Build), some are organized by ONF Ambassadors and some are organized by others and we are taking part by speaking and/or doing demos there. Find out more about upcoming events on our Events page. If you are interested in helping us organize and participate in more events, please consider joining our Ambassadors program.

Community Tools

In addition to the communication tools mentioned above, there are several other tools that are used by the community to collaborate together – such as wikis, issue trackers, code repositories, etc. These tools are open and accessible to everyone and you're welcome to sign up for an account and start using them. Here are links to the different community tools (and information about how to register for an account for these tools is at those links):

Brigades

Much of the work in the community is now organized into Brigades. This is a concept borrowed from the successful Code for America project and it provides a structure for groups to collaborate effectively in an open source community. We've created a growing number of brigades that are focused around priorities for the ONOS and CORD projects and we encourage you to learn more about the active brigades and get involved in the ones that are relevant to your goals and interests. Here are links to learn more about the brigades:

Contributor Guides

Another good resource that provides more details about how to get started with ONOS and CORD is the Contributor Guides on the project wikis. These provide good introductory technical information about the code and tools that the projects use and initial contribution opportunities that will help get you familiar with our project and processes.

Tips On Being Effective In An Open Community

If you've never been involved in an open source community before, you may not be sure about what to do or how to interact – there are definitely differences in working effectively in a highly distributed global online community than with working effectively in an office where all of your co-workers are in the same location. There are many resources that offer advice about this and we recommend you read those (for example, check outA Citizen’s Guide to Open Source Communities and How to Contribute to Open Source).

There is one thing though that we think is most important to consider when getting involved – you are strongly encouraged to step up and start contributing to something that you're interested in. Don't wait for an invitation. It may not always be obvious, but there is always room for you and you are welcome to show up and start participating. This video of an 'un-panel' session is a good example of that – there is always a chair open and waiting for someone who wants to join this discussion and there is nothing stopping someone from walking up, sitting down and joining the conversation.

Sharing Your Impact

As you get more involved and are working on interesting projects, we want to learn about what you're doing so we can share that out with the rest of the community and with people looking for interesting news about the future of networking. We won't be able to tell people about what you're doing though unless you let us know about the cool stuff you're working on. Here are some suggestions for how to let us know about the impact you're having:

Using Community Tools and Channels

You are encouraged to make use of the community tools and channels. There are all sorts of ways to leverage these: use the mailing lists to share what you're doing, submit patches to the repository, edit the wiki with information about your project, go to release planning meetings to talk about your upcoming contributions, etc. Be as transparent as you can and that will pay off – not only will we learn about what you're doing and help promote your work, but you can connect with other people in the community interested in your work who may be interested in contributing to your efforts.

Community Spotlight Series

When you reach a milestone on the work you are doing, let us know and we can put together a Community Spotlight blog post to tell your story. From our experience, these spotlight posts are some of the most viewed content we put together since people are interested to learn how organizations are making use of CORD and ONOS. For some examples of past spotlight posts, check out the post about what KISTI/KREONET is doing with ONOS and what Criterion is doing with CORD.

Brigade Members List

If you are involved in a brigade, make sure that your name is on that brigade's wiki page. We make use of that information in many ways: we pull brigade member information when putting community voting lists together, when determining who to support with travel sponsorships and when looking to see who is doing interesting work that we want to promote. For example, both ZTE and Inspur earned collaborator status due to their activity in the P4 brigade and we learned about it through the information they posted on the brigade's wiki page.

Points of Validation Page

Community Showcases and Science Fairs

We provide space in the programs of our major developer events, ONOS Build and CORD Build, for community members to present information about their work and to demo their projects. We encourage you to not only attend these events but to actively participate in them as well. Check out the ONOS Build site and the CORD Build site to learn more about when the next events will be happening and how you can submit a proposal to take part in the Community Showcases and Science Fairs.

Maintaining Collaborator Recognition

The Collaborating Innovator membership level and Collaborator status both require that an organization remain actively involved and contributing to at least one ONF Project (CORD, ONOS, SEBA, VOLTHA, COMAC, OMEC, P4, Stratum or any other ONF project). We understand that there are times when an organization won't be active (for instance, there are many universities as Collaborators and during the summer there may be not much going on while students are away) and there is no requirement to always be active in the community. If there is a sustained period of inactivity that exceeds 2 or more major releases, then we will make a decision about delisting.

When a Collaborating Innovator member loses collaborator recognition, it retains ONF membership but is demoted to Innovator status.

When a Collaborator loses recognition, it will be delisted from the ONF website and no longer recognized as a Collaborator

In either case, loss of collaboration-level recognition will result in the company having their logo removed from the project member page, they will no longer have access to any associated benefits and they won't be eligible to vote in community elections. Organizations can regain their collaborator-level status back by re-engaging in the project.